1990: An L.A. Times article reports Oak View Elementary School's Latino population rose between 1987 and 1989 from "47 percent to more than 70 percent, a racial anomaly in a district composed chiefly of Anglo students."

1991: Ocean View School District adopts a voluntary plan for integration, also referred to as its desegregation plan.

2009: California Department of Education's Targeted Instructional Improvement Block Grants, some of which were once specifically designated to funding desegregation, were rolled into the general budget for schools to help schools deal with budget crisis.

2013: Ocean View School District superintendent says the district will re-evaluate the need for its desegregation plan.

HUNTINGTON BEACH – At 7:50 a.m. on a Thursday, dozens of parents walk hand in hand with their children to Oak View Elementary School.

It's the second day of school. Spanish is virtually the only language spoken on the sidewalk in front of the school and in the main hallway. There aren't any school buses in the parking lot; almost every kid comes from just a few blocks away. They don't just speak Spanish with their parents, but among themselves, too.

Much like the school's neighborhood, almost all of the students are Latino. In fact, more than 98 percent.

This is exactly the type of segregation that Ocean View School District, more than 20 years ago, was trying to avoid when it created its plan to integrate schools.

And now, Ocean View officials plan to evaluate the need for the voluntary integration – or desegregation – plan it has had since 1991. The district will undertake a demographic study of what the student body will look like in the future because of residential and commercial developments coming in Huntington Beach. The study will serve many purposes, one of which is whether the plan to integrate needs to be changed or if it is still necessary, officials say.

The district's voluntary desegregation plan is one of the only ones in Orange County. But as the necessity of the plan is being evaluated by the district, there is a question of whether the voluntary 1991 initiative has done what it set out to do.

A PLAN FORGOTTEN

Oak View, which was cited as one of two highly segregated district schools in the original plan, seems unaffected by the plan's goals to integrate. The school has been nearly 100 percent Latino for more than a decade, and no one within the district seems to know why the plan hasn't changed this.

“That's a good question, and I don't know,” said Ocean View Superintendent Gustavo Balderas. “It's right across the street from a lot of complexes; it's easier for the parents to walk the kids across the street.”

Balderas, though, is new to the district, coming on board last year.

Roni Ellis, director of administration and communication at the district, said the desegregation plan itself has not been assessed in a long time.

“Do we need to look at this? Absolutely. Is it something we've had discussions about? No, not since I've been at the district level,” said Ellis, who has worked in the district for 17 years. “I don't think we view the segregation as a problem. I think we view whatever social needs the community has (as the thing) we focus on. It has a lot of services, a lot of outstanding staff.”

Ellis, like Balderas, said the school has likely become nearly 100 percent Latino because its neighborhood is the same way and people want a neighborhood school.

“I think the philosophy 30 or 40 years ago was, schools aren't all great if they're all poverty schools,” said Balderas. “And things have changed since then.”

The demographic study could be a factor in determining whether the district reopens schools, he said.

Oak View does provide a lot of services: Most students get free or reduced-price lunch and free breakfast. Community services such as the Oak View Renewal Partnership are also headquartered on campus.

Nevertheless, the desegregation plan, which Balderas calls “almost a dead document,” states that if any school's minority enrollment is more than 50 percent, the district needs to explore options to integrate it.

Once a school's minority enrollment exceeds 70 percent, “it is racially isolated and the district must have enacted interventions … to minimize racial isolation.” It also calls for annual reviews of the effectiveness of such interventions.

Three other elementary schools in the district fit the specifications for the desegregation plan: Westmont Elementary, with more than 59 percent Latino students; Sun View Elementary at more than 51 percent Latino students; and Star View Elementary with more than 52 percent Asian students.

Because the Oak View neighborhood itself is segregated and has higher poverty levels than the rest of Huntington Beach, the problem of the school's extreme segregation is complicated, officials say.

Many say it would be impractical to bus kids across town from their neighborhood school.

“It's definitely a challenge,” she said. “They are 100 percent poverty. But when they come here, they leave all that behind.”

A CHANGE IN DIVERSITY

Gayle Wayne was an administrator at Ocean View from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, right up until the desegregation plan went into place. Wayne said the student population of Oak View was much more diverse then, with many more Asian students.

“We closed nine schools while I worked there,” she said. “In the process of reconfiguration, we made the effort to plan ahead for doing the best we could for dispersing the population of Oak View into several different schools. To the best of my knowledge, that didn't last too long because people didn't want to get on buses to go to school.”

Wayne said she thought it unlikely that a program busing kids into Oak View would work today.

“Because of the fact that the rest of the community is middle- and upper-middle class, it's not perceived as a place where kids would thrive,” she said. “It's a combination of poverty and culture. You can't solve poverty in the classroom.”

In recent years, Oak View has been classified a “program improvement” school – meaning it failed to meet its goals in academic performance – though many administrators believe the state's system for ranking success is flawed.

The school's Latino segregation increased markedly in the late 1980s. Shortly after the 1991 plan was approved – which a 1990 Los Angeles Times article suggested helped the district avoid court-mandated integration – the state's Department of Education relaxed its rules governing the desegregation of schools, according to a 1991 Times article.

Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said there are many issues that contribute to desegregation efforts being lost in the shuffle.

“School districts in California and nationwide are being squeezed for money, so, unfortunately, sometimes voluntary desegregation plans can be viewed as less of a priority than other programs within a district,” he said.

DIFFICULT TRANSITION

Maribel Mendez, vice president of the Parent Teacher Organization at Oak View Elementary, attended the school when she was younger before heading to Vista View Middle School. She said she thinks the isolation at Oak View makes it harder to transition to middle school.

“When I used to go to Oak View and then I went to Vista View … you feel weird, and like the oddball,” said Mendez. “I feel it is a problem.”

Saenz said school administrators often aren't aware why desegregation plans were started in the first place.

“In part, I think that because these programs have been in existence for so long, that new board members are not familiar with what motivated them, are not familiar with their continued need,” he said.

Nationally, the subject of “resegregation” in American schools isn't new. Years after court cases such as Mendez v. Westminster – an Orange County-based case that deemed school segregation of Mexican Americans unconstitutional – and Brown v. Board of Education, court orders mandating desegregation in districts around the country began to be lifted.

A study from Stanford University's Center for Education Policy Analysis at the end of last year found that “more than 200 school districts … have been released from court oversight in the past two decades.”

A few years ago, state funds called Targeted Instructional Improvement Block Grants that were originally designated for funding school desegregation were rolled into general budgets so schools could use the money however they wanted.

“During the budget crisis, Gov. (Arnold) Schwarzenegger flexed those funds,” said Tina Jung, an information officer at the California Department of Education. “That means the law associated with that, which required us to track how those funds were spent, is no longer applicable.”

Saenz said that integrated schools are important but that in many districts across California, voluntary desegregation plans aren't often examined for effectiveness.

“The reality of integrated schools in Southern California, where the population is becoming more Latino … there is nothing wrong with careful evaluation – problem is, that doesn't usually happen. Particularly for a voluntary plan,” he said. “As a result, you don't always see a careful evaluation of what the plan is doing.”

All of these things contribute to a complex picture of integration. As for what will happen to Ocean View's desegregation plan, nothing is certain yet.

STANFORD PROFESSOR TOUTS BENEFITS OF SCHOOL INTEGRATION

Sean Reardon is a professor of education and sociology at Stanford University. Much of his research focuses on the relationships among income, race, education and inequality. He shared his thoughts about the importance of integration in schools and how the issue isn't just about educational segregation but residential segregation, too.

Q: Can you discuss some of the complexities when it comes to discussing racial integration in schools, like the issue of busing kids long distances, which to some people might seem impractical?

Well, that's certainly one (issue). In a perfect world everyone would want their kid to go to their neighborhood school. Walk to school, play kickball in the playground and walk home. Who doesn't want that? But we also live in a society that's very residentially segregated. Housing policy is another way to approach this issue. Short of that, there are different ways to think about achieving diverse schools. You can use magnet schools, you can have schools on the border of distant neighborhoods. There are other ways than just saying “well, it's either neighborhood schools or busing kids for miles.”

Q: What are some of the benefits to desegregation?

Well, there's some research that looked at what happened in late '60s early '70s when Southern school districts were desegregated. If you look at black students … there's a lot of evidence states spent more money on schools once schools became integrated. They raised expenditures, so black students ended up going to much better schools. It improved things for black students. The best evidence we have comes from that era when there was this dramatic change from these completely segregated systems. There's less good evidence about what happens now. … The changes aren't as dramatic. It's a little harder to tease out whether there's clear educational outcomes, but I think a lot of people would suggest that as schools become more segregated, there's a risk that black or Latino students would have access to schools with less resources or things that might matter.

Q: So, then, why is integration important? How has the national emphasis on school integration changed over the years?

Mostly, we live in a diverse society. Schools are the great socializing institutions of American society. Schools ought to be socializing students in ways to be effective participatory members of a diverse democracy. If you go to racially similar sorts of schools your whole life, it's hard to become an adult and participate in complex conversations about race and class when you haven't had any experience with it. In the early 1990s, the Supreme Court made a few decisions that made it easier for school districts to be released from court order. A lot of people predicted that would lead to lots of districts having their court orders lifted. It started to happen by the late '90s, early 2000s. The Department of Justice under the Bush administration made some efforts to end some of the court orders, partly because various districts or people figured out they could ask the districts (to do so).

Q: Do you think desegregation plans are the way to fix things? What are the solutions to racial and economic isolation in schools?

Yeah, they are one among many types of possible solutions. The Supreme Court has made it a little harder for districts to use these voluntary methods. (A couple cases in Seattle and Louisville) a couple years ago said schools couldn't use race in student assignment unless in ways that met the court's criteria; so, you could do things to sort of achieve more equality but you couldn't do it specifically based on race. You could draw attendance zone boundaries in ways that could lead to more diverse schools, but you can't just say “you're white, you go to this school; you're black. you go to this school.” They limited the number of strategies. But that doesn't mean there aren't things school districts can do to achieve diversity.

Q: How is a school further affected when it has a high level of students living below the poverty line as well as minority?

Well, I think a couple ways. One is, people from lower-income homes often come to school with lower levels of school readiness. That can mean the school needs to use extra resources to help those kids get up to grade level and whatnot. So you really need disproportionately more resources in schools serving low-income students to equalize the opportunity, but if you don't do that, those schools can have low performance. It's not that the kids that are poor that's the problem; it's that the schools often don't have the resources to get them up to grade-level.

User Agreement

Keep it civil and stay on topic. No profanity, vulgarity, racial
slurs or personal attacks. People who harass others or joke about
tragedies will be blocked. By posting your comment, you agree to
allow Orange County Register Communications, Inc. the right to
republish your name and comment in additional Register publications
without any notification or payment.